The connection between radio traffic systems and sales has many variables. Sellers often need access, but it depends a lot on your organization’s structure. Sales may play a role in traffic operations, supporting efficiency and accuracy. However, it may also be a pain point.
Whether sales should have access to your traffic system is a complex question to answer. So, let’s look at the pros and cons of this and what kind of radio traffic solution offers advantages.
Why Would Sales Need Access to a Traffic System?
Salespeople can be key users in your radio traffic software, depending on your organization’s structure and size. Here are some use cases that show the benefits of sales using traffic platforms.
Sellers Can Reduce Strains on Traffic with Order Entry Capabilities
Traffic managers often welcome salespeople into platforms to help with order entry. They could log in, submit the order and send it to management for approval. It can create significant time savings for your traffic department.
If sellers can view missing copy for upcoming schedules, they can also address these quickly without involving traffic.
Radio Traffic Systems Offer Valuable Reporting
Sales managers base decisions, forecasting and planning on historical information. Traffic systems capture this and deliver many reporting categories critical to sales, including:
- Billing/aging
- Revenue trends through sales activity and pacing
- Aging information by client
All this data supports the big picture of sales health and may provide intelligence on spending trends. It could prompt sales to do more outreach to certain advertisers if their ad buying becomes irregular.
Sales Can Pull Spot Times and Avails
Sales teams may also benefit from access to pull spot times for clients. They can also review inventory for airtime to see what’s available and get more insights.
Without having a login, they’d have to request the information from traffic, which could lead to delays.
Traffic Platforms Provide Contract Access
Sales may also want to use traffic to review their contracts and make necessary edits. They can also print them if needed. This is another task that would require help from traffic if sellers didn’t have this capability.
These are the pros for sales using radio traffic systems. There are also reasons they’d want to avoid using them.
Innovative Technology Streamlines Processes
With the right radio traffic ecosystem and technology, sales can sometimes bypass traffic systems. As a result, some processes will be more efficient and seamless. Here are a couple examples.
Radio and Digital Campaigns Without the Swivel
Digital and radio perform better together, and a solution like Marketron NXT allows sellers to build these campaigns with ease. From one login, they can create cross-channel proposals, submit orders and access reporting.
NXT’s connection to traffic also provides pertinent information like advertiser and invoicing details without requiring AEs to access multiple systems, so they can spend more time selling.
Sales Collections Tools
If sellers are part of the collections process, they usually need traffic access to review aging reports for their customers. We introduced a new collections tool designed for AEs that doesn’t require them going into the traffic system. They can view outstanding balances for their customers and support accounts receivable.
The tool shows what’s past due, unapplied credits and pre-payments, contact information, and if the customer is an electronic payments user. AEs can then take action to collect by sending links to guest checkout or processing payments on behalf of advertisers.
Modern Radio Traffic Software Empowers Every User
There are big benefits when sellers can use traffic systems. They can have greater visibility into revenue and assist traffic with orders. There are also advantages to bypassing traffic to build cross-channel campaigns and view collections information.
To achieve both categories of benefits, your station needs a modern, optimized and integrated traffic platform. Our solutions enable all this and more. Visit Which Traffic System Is Right for You to learn more about our systems and which one is perfect for you.
